Disappointing follow up

With a book series this big not every book can be a banger, but this one has plumited the story and character development. As the golden one is now free and should undergo a character development as well as the story should reveal more plot. This book has none and instead now focuses on there physical relationship and sounds now like a fan fiction of a court of mist and fury and not like her own story. I struggled a lot to listen to the female narrator as others pointed out, she overdid her clogged nose impression of a queen so much so that you can't listen to her at all.
Both points make me not want to buy the last book as you won't miss it at all.

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good, but narrator had a cold!

third book was so well narrated, but this one let the story down. Aurens narrator sounds like she had a bad cold / blocked nose and Rips character was quite monotonous. please go back to third book vibes for the next few!

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It got better at the last 100 pages or so

I had a really hard time getting through this one. It was so boring and the female narrator was awful to listen to. Her nasal condition was bearable in the last couple of books, but in this one it was significantly worse and she constantly sounded like she was combusting with snot. I actually thought about DNF'ing this book due to that.

However it did get much better at the last hour or so and the pace and story also took of here making it interesting again. So I'll be reading the next one too.

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Narratives

3.75 🌟
After the brilliance of Gleam, I struggled with this book. Firstly, we get too many POV narratives, and I found myself having to transition my reading style back and forth. Secondly, Slade/Rip/Rot/Ravinger, what has it taken so long to know about his background, felt it should have been done sooner and his mother, how was that relevant? Thinking she was dead all a long, to have her suddenly appear felt misplaced. Thirdly, the spice, does Slade have to be so overly descriptive? Every time there were pages of spice, my rating was going down, unfortunately. For a book this large, the content should have focused on the varied characters, that never really got enough time to expand and evolve. Instead, we had big gaps between each of the characters and not enough story or plot development.
On a positive note, the last 100 pages really excelled, and if there had been more of that, then my rating would have been 4. Also, I still hold out in book 5, Gold, that we hopefully learn more about Auren's home and origins and the recovery of the remaining kingdoms.

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Why does the female narrator constantly sound like she’s about to explode with snot???

It’s super annoying that the female narrator sounds so stuffy in every single one of these books, but this one even worse than the others. Literally every single “m” sounds like a “b”. Other than that the books is alright, same as the others it’s good but it’s dragged out a bit and I don’t like that there are suddenly so many POVs, especially the ones about insignificant characters like the queens. Like I understand that it takes the political plot forward but I feel like it’s unnecessary to write entire chapters from their povs, it could’ve been relayed in another way. I’m all about character development but it’s a bit too stagnant at times. Every single time I think the next book is gonna finally pick up the pace but it doesn’t, it’s a good story but it’s so slow.

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Fantastic

The narrator is fantastic. It’s great to have an English accent instead of an American. I’m glad they changed the voice actor for Rip too.

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Narrator

The lady makes every character she enacts sound like a petulant child it was rather jarring to get through this audiobook so stopped listening utterly disinterested and read on my kindle instead.

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The voices

The queen's nasal performance makes me want to hurl my phone across the room. Slades' monotonous rambling is dreadful, He does the other male voices well, so I don't understand why he played Slade with no emotional inflexion at all. Made the character very unbelievable and unlovable.

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Very drawn out.

I was very eager to start listening to this book BUT Bella Sanby’s blocked nose or nasal condition was infuriating and the male narrator had no inflection in his voice whatsoever until he was doing another character. Honestly it was very ‘padded’ but I still listened to the end to see where Auren ended up and Slade. I guessed the outcome much earlier and I was more concerned about Argo!! Queen Malina was just Annoying with a capital A. I’m hoping the next book is more story about Auren Slade & Roth … the ending was a bit too Game of Thrones we just needed a bell and the crowd chanting ‘shame’.

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1 person found this helpful

Going to finish this series!

Although this book was a little slower, I'm going straight on to the next! 🙌

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